The Trumpeteer

What Must Be Done

By The Hermits, Aug 31 2015 9:03PM

There is a sense in which lunacy has taken over the World and the Vatican, the former is understandable, the latter unfortunate. to say the least. The Gospel is not easy to follow if you rely on yourself; if you indulge in the heresy of Pelagianism, namely that one can get to Heaven by one’s own effort one will realize what a difficult thing that is. Augustine was merciless with Pelagianism, as he knew only too well, from bitter experience, how weak we human beings are, and how weak he was, and that it was his mother’s prayers and sacrifices which conquered the Heart of God and deluged her son with torrents of grace. Whatever the Orthodox East’s understandable reservations regarding Augustine might be, and they have a point, Augustine did understand grace. We cannot get to Heaven on our own efforts, but these days you would be forgiven for thinking that that is precisely what the Church teaches, and would that it were classic Pelagianism, which would require heroic effort. These days the daunting words of Jesus that many are called but few are chosen have been reversed, and it has been transformed into many are called and all are chosen. This mind set would be understandable if it had emanated from the oracular utterances of an Edward Schillebeex or a Hans Kung, but when this view that all are saved comes from the pen of one of the good guys at the Second Vatican Council, namely the revered Jacques Maritain one begins to get rather worried. At least Hans Urs von Balthasar only wrote a book called “Dare we hope that all men are saved?” Well we can hope, but I fear it will be hope against hope, and it will be unfulfilled. That modern Man cannot bear the idea of punishment is succinctly summed up by Professor James Hitchcock in his book on the Liturgy published in 1974, when things were bad, but in a different way as to what they are now. He says the following:

“For reasons which are still obscure, the modern Western psyche cannot endure the thought of being under judgment, of having one’s thoughts and actions definitively summed up by the Supreme Judge. To maintain what they regard as healthy self-esteem, modern Christians excuse most transgression, define sin in terms like “failure to grow”, and shut out even the possibility of divine punishment.”

Here are some examples of the madness that consume the not so great and the good. At the World Meeting of families 2015 to be held in Philadelphia between 22nd and 25th September, and which the Pope will attend, some of the leading people involved in this event are well known supporters of the infamous and rightly detested Planned Parenthood, that recently has been under furious fire for its selling of body parts of aborted babies. This has not surprisingly caused the sparks to fly with not a few Catholics fiercely attacking Archbishop Chaput of knowing this and doing nothing about it.

From what one can gather from the Lepanto Institute (presumably not the Lepanto Institute in Italy founded by that excellent historian Roberto de Mattei) and Church Militant, the whole organizing of the Meeting seems to be an exercise in lunacy.

Apparently Robert Ciaruffoli who is the President of The World Meeting of Families donated $1,000 to one of the political candidates, and possible one of the honorary co-chairs of the meeting, (whatever that means; goodness me all these endless permutation of bureaucratic terms emanating from endless committees is enough to drive one to drink!) an Allyson Schwartz who founded the Elizabeth Women’s Center, which is described as a Planned Parenthood facility; yet another grey unexciting title for a wicked use. She of course, is boringly, totally for “Gay Marriage”, “contraception” and “abortion”; and of course there are other people, who are exactly like Allyson Schwartz, and have benefited from Mr Ciaruffoli’s generosity and who are co-chairs of the World Meeting of Families. However before we start throwing moral stones at Mr. Ciaruffoli’s very un-Catholic behaviour, we find out that he has been lavishing funds upon excellent pro-lifers! What are we dealing with? We are dealing with the dangerous effects of pluralism, which completely blurs the distinctions between immoral, or even amoral behaviour, and moral behaviour. Somehow fellow politicians and well educated professionals are worthy of help, precisely because they are competent, professional, pleasant, obviously a bonus, and even charming. However the problem with this that it also includes so many of the clergy who are professional, competent, etc. Heaven help us, the last thing we want are professional priests. We want a Curé d’Ars, a St. Richard of Chicester, a St. Joseph Benedict Cottolengo, a St. Vincent de Paul, a St. Francis de Sales. We do not want spiritual or clerical salesman dishing out dubious dollops of charm, spin, and utterly vacuous statements, and heresy. We do not want them to behave like politicians, because they don’t to it as well as politicians, who at least know what they are doing, namely playing the Devil’s game.

If this is true, then it is very sad as the Archbishop is supposedly one of “The great and the good” in the Church. It would appear, on a superficial reading of this curious muddled story that this is true, and that the Lepanto Institute and Church Militant are quite right to be very worried as to the behaviour of the press and communications offices within the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

However the madness continues for we have the bizarre case of Naomi Klein and Jeffrey Sachs, who are both ethnically Jewish, quite what their religious affiliations are, I do not know, and who are being used as consultants to the Holy See with regard to Climate Change, which at least is rather more scientific than evolution, but equally questionable. Have they informed The Holy See that HARP have been changing the weather for well over 60 years as far as I can make out, and which has now apparently stopped interfering with the weather? I would imagine not.

Now these two professional people could not be more different in their political and ideological view points. Klein is left wing and obsessed with global warming etc. Sachs is right wing and his advice to the governments of Poland, Estonia, and the emerging post-Communist Russia of the Yeltsin era was fairly disastrous. Naomi Klein who is pro-abortion is harshly critical of Sach’s advice to, not only these countries, but particularly with regard to Bolivia. Here Sachs’ policies were so disastrous that he reduced the peasant farmers to such penury that there were forced to produce opium. The madness of the Vatican is rather like Ukraine asking the Americans and the Russians into their country to advise on state security and defence, or rather more ludicrously Poland, early in 1939, asking Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to advise on how to understand Communism and the Jewish Question. Such behaviour would be considered either treacherous or suicidal, and this within the Vatican City; even the hopelessly optimistic St. John XXIII would not have been quite so naïve.

And so we reach the apogee of nonsense when we find that in the benighted world of greater Germany the following, which I quote in its entirety from the excellent website of Lifesite News:

While the Swiss Bishop Vitus Huonder of the Diocese of Chur is still under public criticism for upholding the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church on homosexuality, the Swiss Bishops' Conference is coming under pressure because of its alliance with a man who has been himself promoting the homosexual and gender agenda for many years. Dr. Arnd Bünker is the head of the Swiss Institute for Pastoral Sociology, which wrote the Swiss Bishops' Conferencemuch-criticized report in preparation for the upcoming 2015 Synod of Bishops on the Family in Rome. The report explicitly and insistently requests that the Church cease excluding remarried divorcees from the Sacraments and that she give a place to the partnerships of male and female homosexuals.

In 2014, the same man, Dr. Bünker, wrote the Swiss bishops’ report for the 2014 Synod of Bishops on Marriage and the Family, and he received, as a consequence, harsh criticism. For example, the Swiss newspaper Die Weltwoche said on March 6, 2014:

Of all people, the Swiss Bishops' Conference asks a homo activist and declared follower of the Gender Mainstreaming (that is to say the attempt, to flatten out the natural differences between the sexes) to formulate its policy with regard to the family.

Die Weltwoche continues to point out that Bünker openly lobbies for “homosexual intentions” and was conspicuously helping out with the “Project of a Queer Mass Parish, together with the Working Group Male Homosexual Theology.” In this context, Bünker was trying to “develop a homosexual liturgy,” says the newspaper. Additional research has now shown one of his essays where he is specifically dealing with this topic of a Queer Parish in Münster, Germany.

Words fail me to describe such juvenile, infantile hogwash. That anyone could employ a man like Dr. Bünker as an authentic scholar beggars belief. Things are almost as bad with regard to the German bishops’ conference, who are advised by Stephen Goertz a professor of moral theology, who has taken Pope Francis’ disastrous question “Whom am I to judge?” (This of course was to do with homosexuals trying to live a Christian life, which is also very ambiguous these days, which is like having one’s cake and eat it, and that might have eluded the Argentinian Pope who is operating in the far more sophisticated world of Western Europe, which is not at all like the New World of South America.) and made it the title of his book. Once again I quote from Lifesite news on one more dotty story about bishops and clergy losing the plot on a grand scale:

On August 25, Katholisch.de, the official website of the German Bishops' Conference, published an interview with the German moral theologian Stephan Goertz concerning his new book, Who Am I to Judge? Homosexuality and the Catholic Church.

In the interview, Goertz makes the claim that homosexuality should no longer be condemned because the times have changed. In biblical times, says the theologian, "procreation was the first God-given purpose of sexuality." At that time, "sexuality had as its first purpose to secure the survival of the people"; however, "that is obviously not any more our situation, and that is since the [Second Vatican] Council also not any more our moral teaching on sexuality."

I would suggest that Professor Goertz read Fr. Seraphim Rose’s stupendous book, “Genesis, Creation and Early Man”, which, God willing, will knock some sense into the silly professor’s head, which is obviously a hot house of higher criticism based not on true scholarship but on Enlightenment rationalism which is simply prejudice and certainly not real research, but all about pushing a view point that is supposedly modern, and stuck bang in the late 18th century, an era dominated by false philosophy and a hatred for Christianity.

The question one has to ask is this? Why does the Church have to call in outsiders who have no sympathy with the Church’s life, tradition, and Faith to give answers and provide solutions when Christ has done so already, or to listen to Catholic academics who have obviously lost the Faith? It is perfectly ridiculous behaviour on the part of the bishops, and they must stop this nonsense, and get down on their knees and pray for wisdom, and remain in the ancient tradition of the Church East and West? Did Athanasius ask Arians to help him deal with the Arian crisis; certainly not! He simply responded to them by saying that Christ is God, full stop. The Church looks very silly if she starts asking people for advice, who a) do not understand the Church, and b) who most probably want to see its destruction, or c) are traitorous Catholics.

Another analogy might be this. A publican asks a member of the local teetotal association and a drugs baron on how to run his pub? It is a rather crude analogy, but it shows how preposterous the Vatican is looking these days. It seems that the Church is turning into Little Riding Hood, who in the original, and I only discovered this recently, does get gobbled up by the wolf. No doubt Pope Benedict XVI, at his inauguration as Pope, remembered this fairy tale, when he prayed that the wolves did not get him. Well they sort of did, and thus we find ourselves in this unhappy state today.

How have we arrived at this state of affairs? It would take a genius to unpick the whole bemusing skein of tangled wool, but here is a start.

Yes the Latin Church has suffered terribly from the nominalism of Ockham, which says that the only difference between a sea lion sunning himself and having an afternoon nap on an iceberg, and the heroic Gordon of Khartoum, is in a name. It is only the name that differentiates the two. This shows how silly philosophers and theologians can be. There was 30 or more years ago ridiculous notions flying around the Christian world of “God becoming”. This is palpable tosh. God said to Moses “I Am Who Am.”, and that is that. He then in Jesus revealed that he was three persons and one God. Does one need to say anymore, well of course, with the appearance of the professional theologian, following on from the professional politician, who has to earn his bread or butter, they have got to write about something, and more’s the pity, for most of it is rubbish. The liberals who see in St. John XXIII, one of themselves, in which they are mistaken, should then take heed of his words; “Theologians, theologians, can’t we just say the Our Father, Hail Mary and Creed and be done with it” or words to that effect. Well obviously not!

Let us look to the Orthodox East for some wisdom and sanity before we bring the great edifice of the Catholic Church crashing down around our ears because of our stupid infatuation with the Modern Western World. If we carry on this unhappy political, religious, and philosophical relationship with the contemporary world we may find that it will not be modern at all, but in the past, and that may just be our saving grace, but for that to happen millions upon millions of people may die before they can be reconciled with God or even get to know him. The fault will be ours, who have slumbered too long in the belief that if we ignore all these terrible things, they will go away. However they are not ghosts in the night, who are gone with the dawn, they are the terrible hordes of Hell waiting to drag us all to the Devils disastrous domain ,namely Eternal Hell.

Welcome,

Just a little bit about us for those of you who do not know already know.
We are a tiny community of Catholic Francsican hermits living on a windy Orkney island. In fact last Christmas the wind gusts reached 100mph, yet eased down for three hours just over the period of our Midnight Mass in our tiny Chapel in one of the caravans!
However, experiencing winds that strong whilst living in mobile homes is a rather alarming and somewhat frightening and moving experience! (Even though the caravans are chained down.)
Even with the problems of the wind etc. it was a lovely Christmas, and now we at last have running water to all the mobile homes, Hopefully by next Christmas we will be slightly better set up at least as far as sewage and lighting is concerned. (We have a boat type small wind turbine and a small amount of solar power at present.) We cannot be connected to mains power due to the nearly £20,000 it would cost, and any funds we get would be going to the future set-up of permanent hermitages.
As far as the future building is concerned the plans have got outline planning permision, and are awaiting full permission, and God and donors will have to supply the means.
So we will update you later on the progress, please pray for us in the meantime.
Thank you.